First, I apologize to you all for my tardiness in posting this week. Second, sometimes reading this book makes me feel like a really horrible teacher. We're currently reading In Defense of Food in my class and as part of our discussion we brought in a guest speaker to show Killer at Large, a documentary he'd produced on the topic of obesity in America. There was a lengthy section in the documentary about advertising and how it targets children/teens to sell them foods that are bad for them. Aha! I thought. An opportunity to discuss protectionism in the media and so I asked my students whether they felt tv ads should be regulated and if they needed to be protected from advertisers. It was a really interesting discussion with some students saying they had never realized how manipulative ads were and some students arguing that while they were old enough to know better, little kids might still need to be protected from media manipulation.
I was feeling pretty good about that class discussion until I did this week's reading for class and suddenly I'm thrown into a mental debate with myself because I definitely started that discussion with an agenda and I steered the conversation to make sure that students actually discussed the topic I wanted them to address and part of me still thinks that part of my job should be steering students but part of me is feeling pretty judged by Buckingham for "falling into the trap of trying to teach students the things they believe they already know."
To add to my shame, in the very next section Buckingham says "Despite our repeated insistence that there were no right answers, there clearly were; and it was these answers(or at least issues that we deemed as legitimate topics for discussion) that had largely informed our selection for advertisements in the first place." Ouch, again I can see myself and many, carefully planned classroom "discussions" fitting all too easily into this description. We've talked about how what Buckingham is proposing would really require a paradigm shift in terms of how we teach and what education and assessment look like but these two examples really illustrated to me that I will have to examine not just how I teach, i.e. use of translations, simulations, etc. but that I must also embrace the idea that media literacy is teaching students to examine everything and that this means really stepping back to allow students to reflect and critique without fear of saying the "wrong" answer or at least not the answer I'm looking for.
2 comments:
I am jealous of your life application of this reading. Being self aware is a nice talent.
I am a TA for a class and I am familiar with the curriculum for the class. The teacher gave an example and asked some questions and the students took the discussion in a completely different direction than the example was intended to take the class (in my opinion), but it was interesting that the teacher went with them and continued the discussion in the way they were taking it. I don't know if that is something I could do. It was almost like what they were discussing was equally important as what the teacher had in his notes. To me, it showed a command of the subject and knowing what would be helpful for the students. I struggle with letting the students fail or even figure stuff out on their own.
I don't think Buckingham is trying to make you feel like a horrible teacher, but I do think that we all have room for improvement when it comes to allowing students the space they need to really formulate opinions about media.
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